Effective Content Marketing for an Independent Consultant

Goal with the previous series was to make you a more efficient independent consulting professional. This is in continuation, on how one can use their latent ability to pen your thoughts to your advantage.

If you are reading this, I am assuming you have a LinkedIn profile. You might have described yourself to the best of your ability, using all the keywords relevant to your industry and expertise. But, is your profile getting enough traction from your prospective customers?

If your answer is NO, read on…Let me take you through my successful journey on LinkedIn. I work with B2B Startups and SME’s as an outsourced marketing consultant. At the time of writing this article, I had 14,456 followers on LinkedIn. I usually get around 0.5% to 1% engagement rate on the posts on my LinkedIn profile, which is a decent range to be in. For the uninitiated, the engagement rate is the number of likes, shares, and comments on your LinkedIn post as compared to the number of people who viewed your post.

But you might wonder, how does this translate into business?

Well, I am proud to say that LinkedIn has significantly contributed to my revenues since the past 2 years. I have got 5 marquee clients through discussions initiated on the platform and at the time of writing this article, and have another 4 strategic engagements in the pipeline.

So, how did I manage to get business through LinkedIn?
In three words – Effective Content Marketing.

Here are the 5 steps I took, which you can leverage upon to boost your LinkedIn presence:
• An Eye-catching LinkedIn profile – I benchmarked my LinkedIn profile with some of the best B2B marketers in the Industry and filled in the gaps w.r.t the summary, key skills, and experience. I urge you to do some research on thought leaders around your industry, study their LinkedIn profile, their connections as well as what kind of content they post on their profiles.

• Monthly Content Calendar – After content benchmarking, I prepared a monthly content calendar to streamline my LinkedIn posts. I prepared a schedule for 3 posts a week – Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (these days garner the best engagement on LinkedIn). I created content buckets for the month to structure my thoughts on digital marketing. Content buckets encompassed topics which my prospective customers are interested to read.

• Curated and Original Content – For monthly posts, I curated a set of relevant third-party articles and wrote around 100 words of my own opinion. I also shared original thoughts on various subjects. I also used video creation tools like Adobe Spark to share my thoughts in the form of an engaging video presentation of sorts.

• Boosting LinkedIn posts organically – The LinkedIn algorithm shows your post to only a very minute fraction of your follower base. Hence, to boost visibility, I tag relevant people on my post, use the right hashtags, share my post link on relevant LinkedIn groups and WhatsApp groups, use the article as my WhatsApp status.

• Connecting with the right people on LinkedIn: I identified the apt persona of my target audience, searched and connected with them on LinkedIn regularly. LinkedIn only allows 80-100 new connection requests daily. So, you need to spend a few minutes every day to reach out to the right people and grow your connections.

Once you follow the above 5 steps for a period of 6-12 months, I have reason to believe that you will ultimately lead to business inquiries seeking your expertise.

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author and do not reflect the position or official policy of IndusGuru Network Partners